SLIDESHOW
Indian Test captain Virat Kohli being greeted by his South African counterpart Hashim Amla after the Indian win in the first Test in Mohali on Saturday. Photo: Akhilesh Kumar
Virat Kohli was vehement in his defence of the pitch here and the manner of victory over South Africa.
Three-day match, good or bad for Test cricket: It would have been the right track if the game had gone on for five days, so why not three days. If we lose in England no one asks whether the track was good or not. As Hashim (Amla) said, the batsmen didn’t apply themselves and I agree with him. Those who applied got runs. It wasn’t like teams are getting out for 50. So there is no need to unnecessarily harp on the wicket.
Preparing for overseas tours: It all comes down to how many wickets the spinners get abroad. I don’t think we should compare the two. Fast bowlers should be better, but for that we don’t need to alter home conditions. We can prepare such wickets and hold camps, get those kind of tracks in first-class cricket, but that can’t happen on a regular basis. The bounce and pace in South Africa and the swing in England cannot be replicated here. If you want to play and compete in Tests then the wickets should be result oriented. Like Ashwin pointed out that he never saw any hype when we went on overseas tours. And it should not happen here as well. If you are an international cricketer then you have to use that ability and apply it.
Was the win close than the margin: Yes, the match wasn’t as comfortable as the margin suggests. I wouldn’t say it was very, very close. I would say if they had wickets in hand then it could have been interesting in the fourth innings. Apart from that I don’t really want to get into the deficiencies of the opposition team. I am sure they want to reflect on that and so do we as a batting unit. We have not performed to our potential in this game.
Fear of spin rather than spin caused downfall: I think that was the case. I can comment on our batting. We made errors rather than fear of spin. We made shot judgement errors. We know that it has been committed, it will be reflected upon and corrected, next time we come out to play. As far as the theme is concerned, I think you have to ask the curators. Not me. Eventually we do have a certain nature of Indian wickets that we get. But to make any sort of wicket that don't give you result, I don't see any logic in that. Otherwise, if you say 'How to keep Test cricket alive?' you need to have wickets that will give you results. So it all depends on how the person making the wicket feels about that.’
Forthright comments
South African captain Hashim Amla was forthright in his assessment of the team’s 108-run defeat in the first Test on Saturday.
Lack of application: I agree that we could have applied ourselves a bit better. There were certain decisions that we made while batting that were not right. Even though it was such a short Test match, I think we managed to hold our own right until the last innings here. The chat that we had in our meetings was that the ball wasn’t turning that much, actually. A lot of dismissals actually in both teams were due to lack of turn more than due to excess of turn. Sometimes those are the more difficult pitches to play on. It was just making an error in judgement.
Vernon Philander as opener: We thought we would try and mix it up, try and get a right-hander up front and Vernon I always felt was one of those with solid techniques. He has done a great job for us at No. 7, sometimes against the second new ball and things like that. It didn’t pay off this game but I firmly believe it was a good idea to try and change it up, especially if Ashwin was going to bowl.
Tactics if the nature of pitches remains unchanged: As I said earlier, if you look at the game right until the last innings, I think we kind of did pretty well. Kept the game pretty close to us and almost gave us the chance to win. If the wickets are the same, then hopefully we don’t make the same mistakes and win the game. We have been probably as prepared as we can be. Just making a few mistakes cost us.
How costly was Dale Steyn’s injury: Not having Dale obviously is a difficult one because he is the best fast bowler in the world and certainly in the subcontinent the most successful fast bowler. So it would have been great to have him.